The women of Bravo Company

Friday, October 14, 2005

BY WAYNE WOOLLEY

STAR-LEDGER STAFF

LOGISTICS SUPPORT AREA ANACONDA, Iraq -- With a silver charm bracelet on her wrist and an M-16 rifle at her elbow, Spc. Kari Brustuen fired up the engine of the Army's biggest truck and steered the 50-ton behemoth onto the empty highway.

Within a few minutes, the 21-year-old Army National Guard specialist settled into the drive, chatting and laughing with her truckmate, Sgt. Danny Lowman.

Her demeanor changed in an instant when a small red car pulled onto the highway in front of her truck and into the middle of her convoy -- a potential suicide bomber.

"Don't think I won't hit you," Brustuen shouted, leaning hard on the horn and steering her truck sharply to the right, forcing the red car off the blacktop where it skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. "Nobody gets in our convoy."

Brustuen has driven nearly 9,000 miles during her nine-month deployment in Iraq, the second-highest total among the 250 troops in Bravo Company of the 50th Main Support Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard. The soldier with the most miles -- nearly 10,000 -- is Spc. Keely Hamann, Brustuen's best friend from back home in Minnesota.

The male soldiers in Bravo Company say the fact that females hold the top two spots in the mileage tally shows that women have thrived in Iraq, even in the macho culture of a transportation unit, where bragging rights go to the soldiers most willing to brave Iraq's treacherous roads.

"These girls don't have a mean bone in their body, but they have no problems doing what they're trained to do," said Staff Sgt. Dan Jordan, 42, of Burnsville, Minn. "Mess with them and they'll run you off the road."

But the 44 women of Bravo Company did more than log dangerous miles behind the wheel in Iraq. They were shot at and returned fire with gusto. They escaped from vehicles attacked by insurgents. They mourned the loss of friends, and one, Spc. Anne Hanson of Litchfield, Minn., will be awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received from a roadside bomb.

In a year when some Capitol Hill lawmakers questioned the wisdom of deploying women so close to the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, the women of Bravo Company have shown the debate to be essentially meaningless.

"Women are here and they are proving to be exceptional soldiers under fire," said Col. William Rochelle, of Brick, the commander of the division support command of Somerset, which oversees the Teaneck-based support battalion. "It's a nonlinear battlefield here. Everybody's got a gun."

IN THE LINE OF FIRE

In the past decade, the Pentagon has dramatically expanded the role of women in the U.S. military.

Once relegated to health clinics and clerical jobs far away from the battle, women now can fly combat aircraft and hold dozens of other positions ranging from truck drivers to communication specialists to military police.

The only jobs still closed to women are positions where the main mission is to find and destroy the enemy, combat branches such as infantry, armor and Special Forces.

But the war in Iraq has shown that insurgents target American troops without regard to their military job -- any soldier whose job requires leaving the relatively safety of a forward operating base faces the possibility of a fight.

About 10 percent of the 135,000 troops serving in Iraq are women, according to the Department of Defense.

Earlier this year, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) questioned whether the Pentagon was violating its own rules by putting too many women in the line of fire in Iraq.

Hunter tabled the debate in the House Armed Services Committee after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said new limits on what female troops are allowed to do in Iraq would have an immediate and detrimental effect on the war effort.

Still, a lobbying effort to have women pulled out of harm's way in Afghanistan and Iraq continues, spurred by the conservative Center for Military Readiness. In an interview earlier this year, Elaine Donnelly, the center's president, said women are bearing too much risk in Iraq, especially considering at least some joined up without expecting to ever come under fire.

Staff Sgt. Laurie Tuohy doesn't see it that way.

The 45-year-old field biology graduate student from Litchfield, Minn., is the senior enlisted woman in Bravo Company and she sees the women in her company taking advantage of opportunities that weren't immediately available to her when she enlisted in 1977.

Tuohy was in the last basic training company of the old Women's Army Corps, which wore different uniforms than the men and got its funds from a special Pentagon budget.

"We were pretty much separate from everyone else. ... I like things a lot better now," Tuohy said on a recent day as she took a break from wrapping chains around a fuel truck she was going to haul from Logistic Support Area Anaconda to Forward Operating Base Speicher, 105 miles to the north.

Tuohy came to Iraq as a transportation specialist but is trained in a host of other military jobs, including as an explosive ordnance technician and helicopter crew chief. She was among the first women in both specialties.

She said the women in Bravo Company have made her proud on this deployment, which ends early next month.

"They are an impressive bunch," she said. "But I really can't say I'm surprised. I knew they could do it."

FILLING A NEED

When the 50th Main Support Battalion mobilized at Fort Dix in May 2004 in preparation for its deployment in Iraq, the New Jersey unit needed soldiers from 13 other states to fill out its ranks.

The most critical need was for truck drivers because the New Jersey battalion's own transportation company was already deployed in Iraq. Most of the drivers came from the Minnesota National Guard.

About 20 percent of the soldiers in what was to become Bravo Company were women, most college students in their early 20s.

As the male soldiers looked around their early formations, a few admit they wondered at first how effective the women would be in Iraq.

"On any deployment, you have people you wonder about in the beginning, and a lot of the girls fell into that category for me," said Staff Sgt. David Hill, a 42-year-old truck driver from Corning, Ark. "And on most deployments, the people you wonder about in the beginning are the ones that end up stepping up and really showing you something. The girls did that."

Before leaving Fort Dix, some of the women, like Brustuen, as well as many of the men, had to learn how to drive the Heavy Equipment Tactical Transport (HETT). It was a relatively new vehicle and capable of towing a 70-ton M1 tank effortlessly. The civilian equivalent would be the trucks that haul wide loads, such as houses.

"I didn't even know what a HETT was until I got to Fort Dix," Brustuen said. "They just said 'You're driving this.' I was like 'Are you sure?'"

After flattening a few tires by running into curbs, Brustuen caught on.

Spc. Keely Hamann, 20, her best friend from Appleton, Minn., had her own struggles at Fort Dix. In August 2004, four months before they shipped out, Hamann broke her leg when she lost control of a 30-pound wood panel from a truck trailer. She underwent physical therapy for the rest of her predeployment training and was cleared to go to Iraq the day before her unit shipped out.

Now, the friends who rode bikes to each other's houses to play when they were little girls and attended Sunday school at the Lutheran Church together are driving big rigs in Iraq. They still go to church together on Sundays when they don't have a mission.

The two women racked up miles in Iraq by volunteering for extra missions and because they'd rather drive than being in charge of the radio, the responsibility of the soldier who sits in the passenger seat.

The friends both have made narrow escapes on the road during their time in Iraq.

Underneath the seat of her truck, Brustuen keeps a reminder of the perils of the road: a jagged foot-long piece of shrapnel that hit another vehicle in her convoy during an insurgent ambush. Her truck was the first in the company to be hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb.

Brustuen, who is also trained as a combat life-saver, was one of the first soldiers to come to the aid of Sgt. Manny Hornedo, who was in the gun turret of a Humvee that was hit by a roadside bomb on a Bravo Company convoy on June 28. He died from his injuries.

"That was the longest day I had in Iraq," Brustuen said.

As their time in Iraq winds down, Brustuen and Hamann have had more time to spend hanging around their barracks together, playing cards and painting their toenails -- basically acting like the college students they are back home.

Hamann said she wouldn't have traded her time in Iraq for anything. And she's glad she spent it behind the wheel of a truck.

"They said I should pick something I don't do in everyday life," Hamann said. "Driving a truck across Iraq is definitely something I'd never have done in everyday life."

AT THE MACHINE GUN

Spc. Michelle Maxwell, 21, of Blooming Prairie, Minn., has spent most of her time in Iraq assigned to a gun truck. Her favorite spot is in the turret, behind the big machine gun.

"You feel a lot of power and a lot of responsibility up on the turret," Maxwell said. "We come up on civilians and you've got to decide quickly who poses a threat and who doesn't."

She shares the opinion of most soldiers, who say that after 2 1/2 years of sharing the roads with American convoys, nearly every Iraqi should know by now to pull over to the shoulder when they see the troops coming. Drivers who ignore hand signals to get out of the way are considered possible suicide bombers and either get run off the road or a warning shot.

On a recent convoy, a truckload full of men pulled alongside Maxwell's Humvee and wouldn't pull to the side. It seemed the more frantically she waved them away, the closer they got.

"I shot down the side of their truck and they finally got the message," Maxwell said. It's a response just one step from the last resort -- aiming the gun at the driver and pulling the trigger.

None of the men in the truck appeared to be injured. But Maxwell had a strange sensation after she stopped shooting.

"I'd never felt so powerful," she said. The feeling lasted for a while.

"She was high on life for the rest of the day. It was like she was 10 feet tall," said Spc. Hans Gilbert, a member of her platoon.

Maxwell, who works in a nursing home, still ponders what her feelings meant.

"I mean shooting a .50-caliber machine gun at someone is a real change of pace from waking old people up and feeding them breakfast," Maxwell said.

A SHRAPNEL REMINDER

Spc. Anne Hanson, a 24-year-old nursing student, never expected to leave Iraq with high military honors.

Her truck got hit by a roadside bomb on Aug. 6. She was in the passenger seat. The blast blew apart the window on her side and ignited the truck's fuel tanks.

She and her co-driver, Sgt. Matthew Perrier of Richfield, Minn., both escaped the cab with burns on their legs and shrapnel in their legs and feet. Hanson's right arm was broken.

"It was like someone hit us with a giant baseball bat," Hanson said. "I thought my toe was blown off."

She spent two days in a hospital on Forward Operating Base Speicher and several more weeks recovering. She tried to leave the hospital early but the doctors refused.

"They were like, 'You got blown up. Sit down,'" she said. Her arm has now fully healed, but she will have pieces in of shrapnel in her hand and leg, probably forever.

She will be awarded the Purple Heart for her wounds. She will be the only living female from the 42nd Infantry Division with that distinction.

She downplays the significance of the Purple Heart but not the fact she will be alive to receive it.

"I wasn't lucky that day," Hanson said. "I was blessed."

Her father, Larry Hanson, has been less reserved about the fact his daughter will be coming home to Minnesota with a Purple Heart.

"I think he's told just about everyone in our town," Hanson said. In an interview, Larry Hanson, a retired truck driver and Vietnam veteran, said he and his wife, Pat, just want people to know that their daughter is a decorated war veteran.

"We couldn't be prouder of everything she's done," he said in a telephone interview.

So is the rest of Bravo Company.

Hill, the staff sergeant from Arkansas, said he was most impressed that Hanson opted to stay in Iraq in order to come home with the rest of her unit.

"She could have easily given up her last missions and gone home. But she didn't," Hill said. "She wasn't here to prove anything, but she did. People throw that word hero around quite a bit, but she really is."

Staff writer Wayne Woolley and photographer Jon Naso are embedded with the 50th Main Support Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard, based near Tikrit, Iraq.